e.g. – Austrian Sculpture Park

e.g. Held in the Hand, 2011

A Super Egg has found its home in one of Styria’s major contemporary art venues, the open-air exhibition space, Austrian Sculpture Park. In contrast to a majority of the public sculptures that already inhabit this densely populated site, the chosen egg weighs just 100 grams, standing a mere 3 cm high, and will remain rootless and mobile – embedded in the park only as a portable token to be carried and used on a daily basis by Sculpture Park’s director Elisabeth Fiedler.

Picking up on the contemporary notion of the Sculpture Park as a point of focus for an almost quasi religious contemplative experience and the recent redeployment of Piet Hein’s Super Egg as an anti-stress device, this smooth, solid egg – a persuasively quintessential, if modest, standing sculptural form – might serve as a kind of secular version of worry beads, a reassuringly weighty play-thing, capable of focusing thoughts, evoking stories and enhancing social interaction as it is handled, passed around, positioned or repositioned.

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